i love your writing, Nicolas Cole — you are one of my current Medium faves, and your incessant wide-eyed selfies are actually almost tolerable despite proving the narcissism often attributed to y’all, but this piece solicited a big fat eyeball roll, sorry.
first off, you skipped an entire generation between millennials and baby boomers: mine.
We’re the ones that built the internet as you know it so you can write this kinda thing and get paid for it. Also, most of us Gen X’ers are still current — actually, we’re owning shit, we’re just a lot more calm about it now that startup fever has burned its way thru.
I made my way through Internet 1.0 when I was your age (omg i just said that), had a blog i handcoded in a text editor before the word “blog” existed, and was every bit as self-assured (borderline cocky, really). I got paid for my brains. Then when I neared 40 i decided to start thinking about someone other than myself, and my thinking shifted, slightly, as it may, eventually, for you, too (but hey, my generation also blames boomers for a host of woes — boomers are my generation’s parents, but now that many of us are coming to the ends of our extended adolescence, we are learning to forgive them for being humans, too).
I’m really happy you (and perhaps the entire generation you represent) are finding what works for you in an ever more fucked-up world. Just be careful who you give the credit to for anything — trust me, you’ll look back on yourself after a while and see lots to be proud of, and a whole lot more you hope the Wayback Machine can’t pull back up from the annals of online history (like that old blog of mine, lol).
